The 2010 Texas Poet Laureate, Karla K. Morton, recites a poem at the Strickland Middle School auditorium as part of her "Little Town, Texas, Tour" in February, 2011, in Denton. Photo by by Al Key/Denton Record-Chronicle

By James Jeffrey
For Reporting Texas

For 79 years, Texas has had a poet laureate, and the position looks like it will survive a close call in the current Legislature.

Judd Mortimer Lewis was appointed the first poet laureate in 1932. There have been 46 since. The Legislature now under way began with Gov. Rick Perry announcing he would “suspend” the Texas Commission on the Arts, which oversees the laureate position.

The House budget draft proposed cutting the commission’s budget by 50 percent, leading to a staff reduction of 30 percent. Even if that’s the way it turns out in the final budget, however, the poet laureate position might survive for now. “[I]t would continue the agency as opposed to completely eliminating it,” says Gaye McElwain, director of marketing for the commission.

Yet the poets laureate could face an uncertain future. “We won’t be able to promote it as we have in the past, as we won’t have the money,” McElwain says. “It’s going to be more limited, as we’ll have a limited resource.”

Karla K. Morton, 46, from Fort Worth, is the current and first female poet laureate in nearly 20 years. She wears flowing, floral skirts and a pair of custom-made Leddy boots with a Texas star and laurel wreath signifying her role as guardian of Texan poetry. A 1992 graduate of Texas A&M’s Journalism department, she acknowledges the challenges facing those dealing with the budget.

“I can’t imagine the difficulties politicians must have trimming the budget,” Morton says. “But it would break my heart to know that Texans would lose something that has stood since 1932, when it was obviously so important at that time to get established.”

Stephen Marshall, an American studies professor at the University of Texas-Austin, says that in the 1920s and 1930s, thinkers like Walter Lippmann felt political and cultural life were in crisis “because the democratic self could not assimilate the necessary information to equip them to make informed decisions.”

This led philosopher John Dewey at the time to argue it has always been artists that have assisted the populace in dealing with Lippmann’s conundrum, acting as the true purveyors of news. A tradition evidenced from the ancient poets of Greece to England’s Shakespeare.

“People like Melville and Mark Twain in the United States,” Marshall says, “in terms of the way in which they were able to frame the burning moral and political questions of their day.”

The commission also oversees the selection of the Texas state musician, painter and sculptor. It issues the call for nominations, administers an evaluation panel review and provides a finalists to selection committees for all four state positions.

Until the Senate and House send a final budget to Perry, nothing is certain for the commission or the poet laureate except that Perry proposed “suspending” the agency.

“Anything could happen. It’s very malleable right now,” McElwain says. “Of course we were one that he recommended not to fund, and he has vetoed some of our funding in the past.”

Though the legislature have the final word in voting the budget, for now it goes to Karla Morton, poet laureate of Texas.

“We all need technology and the sciences to live, but without poetry and the arts, life really isn’t worth living,” she says.